Adrienne Dixson the head of the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State’s College of Education and the director of the Center for Rural Education and Communities.
Dixson has a passion for conducting research that impacts social justice and educational equity. Before coming to Penn State, she centered her work in this realm as the executive director of the Education and Civil Rights Initiative (ECRI) at the University of Kentucky, where Dixson previously was a professor of educational leadership studies.
Dixson’s research takes place within the theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Black feminist theories. In 2006, Dixson and her colleague, Celia K. Rousseau-Anderson, edited one of the first book-length texts on CRT in Education, titled “CRT in Education: All God’s Children Got a Song.” She is also a co-editor of “Handbook of Critical Race Theory and Education.”
Dixson’s efforts have recently shifted to focus on how educational equity is mediated by school reform policies in the urban south. In particular, this work focuses on school reform in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, exploring how local individuals interpret and experience these policies, and how those policies become influenced by or reflect racial dynamics.
Dixson also previously served as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2011-22) and as a faculty member at Ohio State University (2004-11).
